Divine Decadence
Everyone remembers Sally Bowles referring to her green finger polish as “divine decadence” in the musical Cabaret. It could define a number of other things, mostly illegal I suspect, but none more accurately than the cuisine of New Orleans. As an ex-pat of that fabled city, I often get nostalgic for its spell, and the easiest way to shed my Big Easy blues is food. I often cook Creole dishes, especially for dinner parties. Granted, my guests are sometimes taken aback by the richness of the meals, but, like Paula Deen says, you’ll be fine as long as you don’t eat like this every day. Friends who are watching their weight have learned to either check their diets at the door or let me know when they’re ready to splurge and fall way off the wagon. In my culinary...
Read MoreEbony & Ivory
After publishing novels more than thirty years, I’ve grown accustomed to all sorts of letters and emails from my readers. The most interesting and unusual one I ever received came last week from a 65-year-old woman living in the Midwest. It was in response to my latest novel, Creole Son, about French painter Edgar Degas’s 1872-3 visit to New Orleans and his encounter with an exotic caste classification based on degree of skin color. For those who didn’t read the book or are unfamiliar with the system, an octoroon is a person who is one eighth black and seven eighths white. Below is an old lithograph of a mulatto (left) and a quadroon, a person one quarter black, three quarters white. I was given permission to publish the following letter on the...
Read MoreGumbo Weather
When readers ask about the prominence of food in my books about New Orleans, I always say I can’t imagine not writing about it. Food is as much a part of the city’s fabric as jazz, Mardi Gras and humidity, and I know from living there eleven years that when people aren’t eating they’re usually talking about it. The city has been a gustatory destination for well over two centuries, so when I began Creole Son about French painter Edgar Degas’s 1872-3 visit, I knew I had to include the local cuisine. The Creoles famously loved to eat, and because Degas’s mother Celestine belonged to that particular ethnic group, it’s reasonable to assume he did too. As a well-educated Parisian of some means, he no doubt had a...
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